FTP - An essential tool for all

FTP Servers

In ever changing times a broadcast engineer has to be aware of both software services as well as baseband manipulation and system integration. FTP services are one of these that they should definitely be aware of!

Subscribing to an FTP service may well work out expensive to a lot of Post Houses and Production companies as well as time consuming as there is twice the effort to get something to a client. i.e. you have to upload the data before they can download it, especially if you have a cloud hosted service. So perhaps the best option is to host your own? This way as soon as you get something into your FTP server at your internals network speed, someone can start to download it! Perhaps reducing your time by hours!

Creating an FTP site isn't as scary as a lot of people would think and can now be completed with the likes of an off the shelf Buffalo NAS which already has FTP facilitates built into its software. Functions and security can be a little restrictive and also a little dangerous if you have more than just FTP data on it.

So... how can you go about making an FTP server for yourself? 
Well, the most obvious choice (but not always the easiest) is to build an FTP server on a Linux box with the likes of Ubuntu the only down side here is that who ever is administering it needs to be Linux savy in order to add users and folder structures. If however you want a windows solution for an FTP server then perhaps the like of Cerburus FTP would be helpful software.

In essence the software allows you to build an FTP server with an outward facing IP address and then through some port forwarding on your router, gives you a ready to go FTP site.

There is a free version for you own use but even the commercial version only runs at a few hundred dollars a year and even offers a web portal to control and manage the system from anywhere in the world!?